WYOMING INSTITUTE FOR HUMANITIES RESEARCH
UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING, LARAMIE
Dr. Susan Oliver
Honorary Fellow in Literary Studies, University of Wyoming
Reader in Literature, University of Essex
Visiting Speaker Presentation
“Transatlantic Magazines and the Rise of Environmental Journalism in the Nineteenth Century.”
Introduction:
How did early nineteenth-century interest in science, travel and exploration shape the ways in which magazines
in North America and Britain represented the natural environment? To what extent did articles in periodicals
address readers’ demands for armchair tourism and the desire to experience, through reading, an encounter
with nature that counterbalanced increasingly urban lifestyles? What difference did newspapers and magazines
make to the way that people thought about the natural world? I consider how a culture of transatlantic
environmental journalism emerged during the early to middle decades of the nineteenth century. My talk will
explore how that journalism provided a multi-medial network across different kinds of publication through
which ideas about natural science, domestic landscapes, pastoralism, and wilderness were shared, consumed
and discussed.
Biography:
Susan Oliver is Reader in Literature at the University of Essex, Honorary Fellow in Literary Studies at the
University of Wyoming, and Senior Member of Wolfson College, Cambridge. She works on Romantic,
transatlantic and periodical studies along with environmental literature. Susan was awarded the British
Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 20007 for her book Scott, Byron, and the Poetics of Cultural
Encounter. She is currently completing two monographs: Transatlantic Journalism 1790-1860: Arbiters of
Opinion and Green Scott: Historical Fiction, Ballads, and National Ecologies.
Susan has held fellowships at the Huntington Library, American Philosophical Society, Institute for Advanced
Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, Historical Society of Pennsylvania and Library
Company of Philadelphia. She serves on advisory boards of the MLA International Bibliography, for which
she is also a senior bibliographer, and the North American Society for Studies in Romanticism. She also serves
on the executive committee of the British Association for Romantic Studies and is co-general editor of the
BARS Review.